““Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. And you know the way to where I am going.””
John 14:1-4 NLT
“Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, for Jesus often met there with His disciples.” John 18:2
Have you struggled with loneliness? Or failure? Have you sipped the bitter cup of rejection and felt the pains of betrayal in your days? Is there anything worse on this earth than to learn that someone you loved didn’t love you? Or, perhaps, you’re successful and surrounded by plenty – plenty of success and family and friends and associates. But privately you fear that you might somehow lose it all…that you might fail. Fears of mistakes and catastrophe awaken you at night, hound you, and you are always on edge. Behind your smiles there is a deep and abiding trepidation. The economy could tank, businesses could fail, your job could be lost, your health could fail…time and chance happen to everyone. It is terrible, sad, but so true.
Or maybe there’s even more to that fear. Maybe you have failed. And spectacularly. Right now, maybe, you’re down. Way down.
So, what a great comfort we have in Scripture.
On the night of his betrayal, on the eve of his earthly destruction and humiliation – facing a pain and rejection none of us can fathom, our Lord spends time with his disciples, whom, we relish to know, he calls friends. Doesn’t he know that soon all will scatter and abandon him in this great and terrible hour? These that he includes and gives the honor of being his most trusted companions will desert him. The Shepard is struck and the sheep are, well, sheep. Of course, Jesus knows. He is aware. Still, though, He brings His friends anyway. And on the eve of His crucifixion, hours before all that agony, what does He think to do? He has dinner with His friends. Friends He knew would scatter. And hide. And deny Him. Even betray Him. He knew all this and yet there He was with them. This is the God who hears us in our timid prayers. He sees all the tears we weep. He knows every hair on our head.
So, in the deepest agonies of doubt and dread, beset by demons past and present, Scripture quiets our troubled souls by telling us that though we will fail Him in so many ways, Jesus will never fail us. Though in trials we will suffer, slip, and give every reason for abandonment, our Lord will never, never, lose His unbreakable grasp upon us. Look at the price He is to pay and contemplate what kind of God this is. Who would stand for this treatment from those that you give all? Who, in such an hour of unspeakable anguish and peril, would include those that he knows will fail him? Surely, this is no man-made god because the indignities that He suffers from both friend and foe are too vast to comprehend. On paper (as the saying goes) no one would follow such a god. But this is the true and living God – in the flesh. He is the breathing Word, able to call forth legions of angels to pulverize any mouth that dare utter a hostile word to Him. But instead, for the glory before Him, and for the sake of the elect, He submits to these horrible things.
This would all be just sentimental, feel-good nonsense if Jesus had stayed in the tomb. That He didn’t paints this garden scene so much different than it must have looked on that night.
Oh, glorious Father, we thank you that you are a personal God – not an impersonal force or abstract truth. You are absolute truth and complete personality. You offer sinners not only a pardon but a full restoration of meaning and love. And to our doubts and failures you say, “I will give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.”
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